Examination of Witnesses (Questions 420
- 439)
MONDAY 30 MARCH 2009
MR MONTY
DON, MR
PETER MELCHETT
AND MR
ROBIN MAYNARD
Q420 Chairman:
You would have to have an objective measure in some way to monitor
this because otherwise you are talking about encouraging people
to good farming practice which if you do not put organic material
into your soil in the current arrangements, you just do not do
it and just carry on.
Mr Melchett: With organic farming,
just like organic gardening, you have to. It is inherent in the
system. For example, our plants will have denser root mass and
a longer root because they have to search for nutrients more than
the non organic similar plant and that will be returned to the
soil. We would almost always have winter cover crops if we harvest
in the summer/autumn and then plant in the spring. There are the
green manures used in organic systems and so on. It is an inherent
part of organic farming.
Mr Don: A farmer will pursue the
best possible result using the techniques available and these
become self-evident as you use them. It is not something that
has to be spelt out.
Mr Melchett: I farm on chalk and
sand in northwest Norfolk and this year for the first time ever
the muck-spreader got stuck in the mud. Mud is unheard of on our
farm but it just retains far more water after 10 years of organic
farming than it ever used to. The difference is extraordinary.
Q421 Chairman:
My allotment bears testament to that. I do not want you to bring
your tractor on to find out if it is suitable. Let's move on to
your observations about the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit report
Food Matters. You rather felt as in these comments on food security
that the final version has been somewhat watered down from the
beginning. This is an interesting piece of intelligence. Would
you like to enlighten us some more about that?
Mr Maynard: The quotes we gave
you were from an early version of the report which came out in
January 2008 but in the final version which was published in July
in the summer, they disappeared. We were very enthusiastic about
the Cabinet Office Strategy report because it recognised the issue
of climate change and resource constraints and it also recognised
the issue of diet and ill-health. There were very powerful statements
from that report. You said at the beginning, Chairman, that Defra
are starting to look at this and indeed they are and you can certainly
see a transition from 2006 when their first report came out on
food security when they were incredibly complacent about climate
change. This was really only a problem for the developing world
and we would be fine. Then by 2008 their latest report was a little
more robust, but still looked to the UK as a rich trading nation,
able to go out on the world market and get food. That seemed to
be where Defra was coming from and the Cabinet Office Strategy
seemed to be slightly pushed back into the distance. Similarly,
the other report, which has been a very powerful influence, certainly
to my thinking, is that from the International Assessment of Agricultural
Science and Technology for Development under the chairmanship
of Professor Bob Watson which said exactly as you said that business
as usual is not an option and we do have to change. This is the
work of 400 scientists; it is not three people from the Soil Association.
It looked at some of the approaches that should be taken but it
just does not seem to be influencing Defra or government thinking
in the way that you would expect, given the chairman is now their
chief scientist. We have a few warning bells going off.
Q422 David Taylor:
Let us talk numbers. Like every other accountant I am not happy
unless we can measure something and look at things from that perspective.
The second point that we put into the inquiry framework did quote
numbers and it talks about the challenge of increasing global
food production 50% by 2030, which was one that was drawn from
the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon in June 2008, the further
challenge 20 years later to double world food production from
where we are now, not least to feed the world population that
is about a third as large as where we are now. You take the Committee
to task in a way, and there is nothing wrong with that, in saying
that to talk about food production is to too narrowly focus this
particular inquiry. You are looking at the calorific value of
what is produced at the moment and you point out that two billion
are clinically overweight in the north and one billion malnourished
in the south. How can we link those two very easily? Is it not
too facile a link? How will reducing obesity in our hemisphere
actually address the problem of malnourishment elsewhere?
Mr Melchett: It will not, of course,
any more than us producing more food here, reduce malnourishment
in the south. We need to have systems, as Monty said earlier,
in every country which are sustainable environmentally, which
are capable of producing food for the population without reliance
on the massive use of fossil fuels and big greenhouse gas emissions
because that is going to come to an end between now and 2050.
What we can do, if you look at the Reading University report we
mention in our evidence which looked at what would happen if all
of England and Wales was farmed organically,[21]
taking existing levels of production, you would of course stop
feeding about half of the grain we grow to animals—chickens
and pigs primarily, but also high performance dairy herds—and
as a result we would have less meat, but more of it would be grass-fed
which the UK is particularly suited to. You would probably end
up with as much grain and pulses available for human consumption
as we do now. In any look at what we need to produce and how we
are going to do it, we think that we also need to take into account
significant changes in diet. That sort of system, according to
the UN agencies involved like the UN Convention on Trade and Development,
is also most suited to feeding people in Africa, for example.
They have just published a report, which I think we refer to in
the evidence, which says looking at a large number of projects
in Africa, organic systems work best to feed local people precisely
because they do not rely on expensive imported inputs like seeds
or fertilisers or sprays which African farmers are not in a position
to buy in any event.
Q423 David Taylor:
Robin, you have signed up to the evidence sent to us by the Soil
Association. You do accept that a growth in volume is necessary,
not just a change in mix because we have got a world population
growing by a third possibly in the next 40 years or so. We do
need to increase production, do we not?
Mr Maynard: I accept the point
to a degree but the point we were trying to make is ironically
and sadly that the world produces enough food to feed everybody
now and for the future according to the World Health Organisation
and that is where that statistic comes from.
Q424 David Taylor:
And for a future which has a global population of what?
Mr Maynard: That is debatable
and questionable. That is where we need government to be looking
at what is the capacity of everyone's country and land to feed
their populations. If you consider China you start getting very
worried about the figures of sustainable feeding of the world
because every 12 million increase in population each year, which
is what the country is experiencing, and every diminution of their
land area which is also happening, means they are looking out
to the world markets. Their need for grain is potentially the
entire US grain harvest. There is no doubt it is a major challenge
but we are wasting a lot of food in terms of putting it inefficiently
into intensive livestock and, worse in the United States, they
are putting it into car fuel tanks rather than people's stomachs.
We are also using land to grow tobacco. There is a fair amount
of land out there and calories available and that is where you
do need government and international intervention. You just have
to recognise that we waste an awful lot of food at present and
we could adjust it so that we could feed people comfortably.
Q425 David Taylor:
The NFU, the CLA and Natural England all broadly accept the figures
with which we are working—the 50% and the doubling. The
Soil Association are saying that we can feed the world at the
moment and possibly into the short to medium term by changing
the mix of food we produce and presumably by influencing consumers.
Mr Don: The two are wedded. You
cannot just change what we eat. We have to address the consumer
as part of the solution rather than just the end of the equation
to the problem. We need to change our diets; we need to for health
reasons anyway. We need to stop our waste. I am sure that you
have heard endless accounts of how much we waste and what we need
to do about it. We probably need to eat a bit less and we need
to pay more for it. These are politically not very acceptable
things to say and do, but I think that is going to have to be
addressed.
Q426 David Taylor:
Governments that proselytize about eating less and say we are
going to tax those things that are unhealthy for you, you can
imagine the reaction.
Mr Don: That is why I do not think
government is necessarily equipped to do it because inevitably
it becomes another injunction about "you must not do".
The only way we are ever going to get anything done is to make
people want whatever the end result is or to want it more than
the opposite, which is ill-health, which is the effects of climate
change. If we can change to a system whereby we eat a lot less
white meat, the red meat that we do eat is grass and basically
solar power, grow more vegetables and more fruit. We are all told
to eat five fruit a day. I am sure you probably know that 90%
of the fruit that we eat comes from abroad. We do not grow it.
Q427 David Taylor:
We have the National President of the Fruit Association here.
Mr Don: It is a shocking statistic.
There is wonderful fruit that we can grow here but we are not
doing it. In other words, if we did what we can do so that it
is efficient and we are not wasting from the farm or wasting the
transport, not wasting the packaging, not wasting in the fridge
and on the plate, what we eat is healthier. Peter mentioned the
whole thing about organic growing is that the take-up of nutrients
if you have a carrot that is healthy it is not just healthy in
itself but it is healthier for you, whereas if you force it using
fertilisers it will not be taking up trace elements and nutrients
that you need. If you talk to GPs, one of the astonishing things
that I found is that they will talk about malnutrition in middleclass
otherwise healthy people because they are not getting the nutrients.
The problem is incredibly diverse and complex and cannot just
be broken down into one production.
Q428 Chairman:
You put forward a wonderfully persuasive case. I just wish you
would speak to the carrot root fly and tell them to go away. I
would like to have the carrots that you describe. The problem
that we face is that you did not describe, even in just framework
terms, how do we get from where we are to the model that you have
described? As I think David Taylor was pointing out, if you take
all of the health messages—government has been at it for
quite a long time—and take, for example, smoking, this House
of Commons eventually had to introduce a legal ban on smoking
in public places because all of the messages eventually were being
listened to and parliament took a view about it. You have very
carefully said that it would not be a good idea in terms of the
world of food to have government continually telling people what
they should not be doing. I suppose we come back to the fact that
we have got to get from where we are to where you ideally want
us to be and there is a limit to how much the schools' programme
that Peter described is going to be able to do it. I just wondered
if you had any insight as to how you actually move the public
opinion in the way that you would want?
Mr Don: Government and parliament
can play a role by facilitating and enabling people to do it for
themselves rather than telling them. I think the schools programme
is a good one because it is not trying to change everything in
every way overnight. You are simply drip-feeding in possibilities
and opportunities. Unless people take it up themselves, it will
not happen. Unless the children go home and asked for the baked
potato rather than a pot noodle it is not going to work. You cannot
say "you shall not have a pot noodle"; it has got to
be desire. When I said that it needs to come from the ground up
I was trying to be practical because I think that is really the
only way it will work. People like me can try and change the way
people work on a day to day level, but what I cannot do is what
you lot can do is change the structure or facilitate that. At
the moment in all sorts of ways it is quite difficult whether
it is health and safety restrictions, whether it is to work locally
the facilities might not be there. Abattoirs have gone; they just
do not exist if someone wants to make sausages locally. If we
tie in health with social behaviour, which is vital, production
and also security, having resilience against the domino effect,
they do not need to work in a heavy-handed way. It is very impractical
to say right, we will get schools doing this; we will get hospitals
engaging with farms. If people cannot afford food why are we not
subsidising their food in the same way as we subsidise their prescriptions
or their housing? Why do governments not see healthy good food
as a necessary part of a healthy good society rather than as a
luxury? That is where governments come in again.
Mr Melchett: Somehow or other,
if the legal requirements in the Climate Act can be met we will
have to take 80% of greenhouse gas emissions out of food and farming,
or because it is one of the big four sectors for emitting greenhouse
gases alongside energy generation, transport and housing, you
are going to have to take 100% or more out of other sectors, which
is not feasible or realistic. It is going to have to happen between
now and 2050. We all have to find a way of making it happen and
the Government has a legal commitment to do that. I understand
that you asked for some insight on the Cabinet Office Strategy
Unit. This proved to be one of the more controversial points when
the first report was discussed with different departments. They
could start by looking at their own procurement and making sure
that they are buying, and government departments have a big budget
to spend on food, as climate-friendly food as they possibly can.
When you mentioned the House of Commons in that connection, the
House of Commons of course could think about making the food as
climate-friendly as well as I am sure very tasty and as good value
as it already is. There are things people can do to send signals
about the fact that we are going to have that huge change take
place in the next few decades.
Q429 David Lepper:
David Taylor is encouraging you to look to the future in terms
of the predictions that have been made about what would be needed
and the extent to which organic methods can help to satisfy those
needs. The University of Reading has produced this report England
and Wales under organic agriculture and how much food could be
produced. I think it is true that, Peter, in your introduction
you describe it in a sense as an informed guess. Elsewhere you
talk about the report being "the first step" to looking
at what food is being produced in England and Wales through organic
methods. How robust is this report in terms of indicating potential
in satisfying the demands for food?
Mr Melchett: That is a very interesting
question. I think it is robust in this sense. First of all, the
Centre for Agricultural Strategy at Reading University is very
well respected in this particular field and they use data collected
by the Government in the farm business survey. The baseline data
is good, the academic work is top grade and they have made their
estimates by multiplying up what existing organic farms in the
farm business survey produce to fill the land area available.
Where we would say it is a first step is in this sense that it
is looking at what might happen 20, 30, 40 years down the line
without taking into account huge changes which would inevitably
accompany the growth of organic farming. We know that by looking
at countries like Austria and Switzerland which are a long way
further down this track than we are. We know, for example, that
the amount of research effort that goes into organic farming in
countries like that is far higher than here, which is why when
I grow a new variety of seed, milling wheat, it has been bred
in Germany, not in the UK, or when the NFU spokesman on organic
agriculture plants a new organic apple orchard to supply apples
to Sainsbury's, the apples have been bred in Italy or Switzerland
and not in the UK and it is a tragedy. There are countries in
Europe who are further down this track than we are and we know
that there will be more R&D going into organic. We know that
that will greatly increase the potential for higher levels of
production from organic systems without any additional chemical
or oil inputs, and we know that for many of the positive effects
of organic there is some scientific evidence to suggest that they
will be enhanced as organic farming spreads. We know, for example,
that farming and wildlife would benefit from bigger blocks of
organic land as of course would reducing water pollution and other
things which organic farming does. As it spreads the impacts will
be more than the sum of the parts concerned. Machinery is another
and I could go on.
Q430 David Lepper:
One of the questions we ask in this inquiry is what should Defra
be doing? It sounds to me from what you are saying that one answer
to that would be about the extent to which Defra can direct research
and development in this country and maybe there is a role for
government in making decisions of that kind.
Mr Maynard: There is massive disparity
between the amount of publicly funded R&D that goes towards
organic, compared to that towards biotechnology in particular.
The last figures I saw were something like, if you were generous,
about £1.6-£2 million per annum to organic and at least
£49 million, possibly £70 million of public money, to
biotechnology. There are no GM crops commercially grown in the
UK at the moment whereas the organic sector is still seeing some
growth. It does seem disproportionate in terms of R&D. You
can see the analogy between the renewable energy which you are
familiar with of renewables in this country and nuclear and others
where the renewables have been starved of R&D funds for years
and therefore we are a bit further behind than we could be when
we really most need them.
Q431 David Lepper:
Why does the Reading University report only look at England and
Wales?
Mr Melchett: It is because Scotland
collects their farm business data separately. We had to wait about
a year to get the latest data from Defra. Reading University are
one of the universities that collect farm business data, so they
have access to that.
Q432 David Lepper:
There could be a Part 2 to this?
Mr Melchett: There could be a
Part 2. My colleagues in Scotland are looking at that.
Q433 David Lepper:
Monty, you suggested a little earlier, and I wish I had written
the phrase down, that the kind of future you want to see is not
necessarily all organic—perhaps ideally it is but in realistic
terms it is not—but a mixture of organic and non organic
farming methods. Could you enlarge on that?
Mr Don: Sometimes there is this
idea that organic is a fundamentalist viewpoint and view organic
as beyond the pale. There are plenty of farmers who are not organic
but who are superb farmers doing an incredibly good job and I
admire them enormously. I think that would apply to any organic
grower. I do not think the world is ever going to be wholly organic.
What is important is that we are facing a crisis and we all have
something to contribute. Quite frankly, in times of crisis you
do what is best and if there are some people doing superb things
that are not organic, then let them get on with it. All we can
do is to try and inform and encourage people to use organics to
its maximum potential; that is key. What the report says is this
is not an idyll; it is really practical. It is a way of dealing
with a specific problem.
Q434 David Lepper:
In terms of those other criteria that you quite rightly talked
about—climate change, health and about the economy—you
would see a kind of mixed economy and it is a question possibly
in addressing all of those issues.
Mr Melchett: This picks up the
point, Chairman, that you made about how is this going to happen.
Last year, when the oil price was a good deal higher than it is
now, we got one of the leading farm business consultants, Andersons,
to look at the impact of changing oil prices on a model—they
have a model, non organic farming—and we asked them to look
at the impact on organic rotations, the gross margins of the whole
rotation, not individual crops, and of course there will come
a time if oil becomes scarcer and more expensive as a result and
natural gas becomes more expensive and therefore fertiliser rises
in price, then actually it is cheaper to produce food using the
sunlight and clover than using an artificial fertiliser. Then
maybe you will need to form a society for the preservation of
non organic farming just to keep a few demo farms open to see
what it was like in the last century. It will become too expensive,
I suspect, rather than die out for any other reason.
Mr Don: Last summer one of my
neighbours—I have a little farm in the Black Mountains—who
teases me a lot about being organic, came up to me and said the
trouble is the way prices are going I am going to be forced into
becoming one of you lot, and how we laughed, but the point was
it is going to be driven by economics for farmers in particular.
Mr Maynard: There are plenty of
farmers who use organic techniques, such as clover, and they are
not organic farmers.
Q435 Chairman:
One of the things that struck me—I have not read every word
in the Reading report but I have had a good look at it and I have
looked at the discussion at the end—and that I found lacking
in it is that it is very strong on inputs but it is not so strong
on risk. It does not talk, for example, about if you increase
the proportion of UK food production that was from organic sources,
it does not talk about what happens if some new disease or pest
arises and how you would therefore cope with it within your regime
as at the moment. Going back to the visit to Jealott's Hill and
we have been to Rothamsted and we have been to John Innes, you
will not be surprised to learn that one of the lines that they
put to us were the developments in modern agrichemical techniques
to counteract growing plant disease, for example, and one of the
things that concerned me was how vulnerable would a system be
if you increase the proportion of food coming from organic sources,
you therefore cannot afford to have complete crop failure because
you are not able to deal with a pest or disease. How realistic
is that threat?
Mr Don: Any organic grower absolutely
works on the basis that it is a healthier system. You have less
risk of crop failure by growing organic, partly because of the
careful and at times quite sophisticated use of companion cropping
and rotations and timing, and partly because you are not dependent
on monoculture. You have to have mixed farming; you have to have
a variety of crops and animals and you need the manure and you
need your own self-contained system.
Q436 Chairman:
Let's get off the manure bit because that is the relatively easy
bit of the organic side. I am interested to know how robust the
system is, because perhaps Peter might also like to comment when
you have finished, Monty, on your observations, because when you
look at some of the crop threatening conditions that are outside
there, for example, that have to currently be dealt with in conventional
farming by use either of pesticide or fungicide, we have to know
if a greater proportion of our food supply was dependent on organic
techniques how we would cope because those diseases are not going
to go away, are they?
Mr Don: No, although if you used
artificial fertilisers you get a very different kind of growth.
You get a much sappier growth and a much faster growth and they
are much more prone to fungal infection, much more prone to insect
attack and damage, so therefore the whole organic system tends,
and certainly intends, to breed healthier plants. That is one
really important key to it. It is a less risk involved. You do
not get these plagues—rust on wheat or blights—for
instance, potatoes if you grow them organically, if you talked
to any farmer growing potatoes 30 or 40 years ago blight was not
very common, but now, particularly in Herefordshire where I live,
it is absolutely endemic because of the system that is just using
fungicides on blights and fungus symptomatically instead of trying
to get a system that is fundamentally healthy. What we now have
in non organic farming, and gardening too—it is the same
idea—is a fundamentally unhealthy system which you fight
and deal with, whereas organic farming and growing is about creating
a fundamentally healthier system.
Mr Melchett: To give you an example
from my family experience, I have been involved in farming since
the late 1950s, most of that period non organic. During that period
wild oats became an increasing problem in cereal farms in East
Anglia—it is the equivalent of black grass and other weeds
in other areas—it was not a problem immediately after the
war. It became worse and worse to the point where, we are seed
producers and we were non organic and are now organic seed producers,
we would have to have people hand-working in the fields for wild
oats or use very expensive and difficult sprays to try and control
them. When we converted to organic that was my major fear and
all my neighbours thought that we would have fields just completely
covered in wild oats. The problem of wild oats has decreased year
by year since we went organic. There was a dramatic fall immediately
and we still hand weed because we are growing seed crops—seed
wheat, seed barley and seed peas—but the amount of time
the gang spends on the farm has halved, maybe less than that,
and wild oats are very much less a problem. It is partly because
we have brought back a much more varied rotation; it is partly
because a lot of these weeds of modern arable farming, like the
fungal diseases, are diseases of nitrogen fertilised crops. They
are diseases of thicker, weaker crops, grown closer together.
When you stop using the fertiliser you really do not need pesticides.
There is a piece of academic research at Newcastle University,
and you visited three of the leading pro-pesticide research institutes
so you might think about visiting one of the leading European
organic research sites at Newcastle University at the university
farm where they have done some very interesting work in looking
at the relationship between artificial fertiliser and pesticide
use showing that the one and the other go together and the economic
drivers for using pesticides if you use fertilisers are irresistible
for farmers. I think we would be more resilient, both in the variety
of crops, resistance to disease and it is true of livestock I
have found with breeds of pigs on the farm too. I am not suggesting
that we are not all threatened at some point or another and that
is true for non organic farming as well as organic, but we are
going to be better off overall.
Mr Maynard: In terms of the system,
Chairman, the foot and mouth epidemic was a classic case of a
very centralised system spreading a disease fast. A more localised
system where there were more regional markets, there were more
abattoirs rather than pigs going from Northumberland down to Kent
and to Devon, would seem to be a more resilient system. We have
lost thousands of abattoirs and you saw what happened, as was
mentioned earlier, during the fuel protest when a few pretty mild
mannered truckers and a few farmers closed down some food distribution
depots and oil depots and London came within three days of running
out of food because there were not the hubs because supermarkets
were relying on we do not stock stuff really and we have very
little in store; we just bring it down the motorway. Suddenly
you see that system is much less solid than we have been led to
believe.
Q437 Chairman:
I am a bit concerned that your Reading report seemed to be pointing,
certainly as far as the cereal outcomes were concerned, that your
minor cereal crops, as it describes them, of oats, rye and things
like that would get removed from the regime as one pushed on for
the quest for wheat, and yet in terms of, for example, micronutrients,
rye has a great deal to contribute. I am rather surprised to find
a report like that which seems to subscribe to the removal of
the kind of diversity you have just espoused.
Mr Melchett: I do not think Reading
was predicting the future. What they were doing was taking the
system production and multiplying it up. Because you are working
from a small statistical base there are oddities and one of them
was that they found production of some of the minor cereals would
increase to hugely high levels and they thought that was just
unrealistic and a feature of the data they started with. We are
not suggesting this is the future, as I think I said in the foreword,
as you mentioned that Reading is a starting point, but it does
show that it is not impossible to foresee an agricultural system
which is not wholly reliant on fossil fuels for fertility effectively.
Q438 Chairman:
To sum up, the main message is that you believe following your
methodology that we could have a substantial increase in production,
but if I am reading you correctly you are not advocating moving
100% the whole of the UK agriculture to an organic regime. You
recognise that there may be limitations and that the two systems
would have to co-exist, but in terms of achieving a sustainable,
durable, robust and secure form of food supply that the approach
you have outlined could make a contribution and a substantial
increase in production. Would that be a fair summary of where
we are?
Mr Don: We would like to see the
whole of the UK agriculture organic but we are not saying that
is (a) likely or (b) necessary—personally I would like that
a lot—but I think we can feed ourselves. Two keys things:
flexibility, we need to remake the model of our food production.
It is not going to work with all the constraints and changes that
are being forced upon us. We need to connect far more actively
than we are now health and food and society and food. At the moment
the gulf is terrifying.
Q439 Lynne Jones:
I do not want to put words into your mouth but in terms of the
response to the Chairman's question would it be correct to say
that you want to see a smarter type of agriculture so that we
reduce the influences that contribute to climate change? I think
you would agree that we need to move in that direction.
Mr Maynard: I think that is a
very good way of putting it because it is a very simplistic approach
just to pour nitrogen on—
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